The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a significant shift in how and where we work, play and live. In this Kenan Insight, we explore which changes will be temporary and which are here to stay.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has been a recurring theme throughout the 2020 U.S. elections, and its health and economic consequences will be felt far beyond November 3. In this Kenan Insight, we look at both the challenges and potential opportunities the pandemic has created for accelerating innovations in healthcare delivery and pharmaceutical development.
The widespread adoption of technological advances has made the move to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic a success. In this Kenan Insight, we look at why the switch was such a win, its impact on worker productivity, and what it means in the long term for workers, office spaces and cities.
As the pandemic forced shutdowns across the globe, U.S. government entities at the federal, state and local levels worked swiftly to secure known drivers of economic growth and job creation – including entrepreneurial ecosystems and small businesses. And while the programs implemented were widely lauded as successful, the story of who benefitted – and who did not – is more complex. This week’s Kenan Insight explores our experts’ key findings around the roles of policy and implementation in supporting equal access to opportunity.
The explosive growth in ESG investing has created confusion among investors. As part of our yearlong series on stakeholder capitalism, we unpack what they should expect from ESG and try to reconcile it with both financial theory and empirical evidence. The bottom line is a bit complicated.
There’s no escaping the growing interest in environmental, social and corporate governance investing, but not everyone agrees on how to define, measure or report the variety of factors considered under ESG. Professor Laura Starks of the University of Texas McCombs School of Business spoke on the subject in May at the Alternative Investments Conference, sponsored by the Institute for Private Capital. Starks’ keynote speech, highlighted here, examined the knowns and unknowns of ESG investing as well as new regulations that may be coming.
As part of our 2023 grand challenge, we survey factors such as demographics, health trends, immigration and childcare that are essential to understanding the dynamics now at play regarding the supply of workers in the labor force.
Our American Growth Project examination of skills in the workforce begins with a discussion of why skills are difficult to measure, then moves to a broad look at two ways to estimate the skill level across our Extended Metropolitan Areas.
With economic growth can come growing pains, such as an increased cost of living and displacement of local businesses. An NCGrowth report examines how communities with a large manufacturer can minimize those pains.
As governments try to keep up with broadening economies and address new areas, such as climate change, data protection and artificial intelligence, the regulatory pace is increasing. This expansion creates new costs and requires increased business resiliency.
Times are tough for universities. Leaders on campus are facing more pressure than ever – strategic, operational, and financial. How do we manage our administrative functions efficiently to free up resources for our core dual mission of teaching and research?
On September 30, 2018, California became the first U.S. state to set quotas for women directors on corporate boards. The passage of this law resulted in a significant decline in shareholder value for firms headquartered in California. The decline in shareholder value is directly related to the number of female directors that firms are required to add under these quotas.
Governments often subsidize startups with the goal of spurring entrepreneurship using tax incentives. Exploiting the staggered implementation of angel investor tax credits in 31 U.S. states from 1988 to 2018, we find that these programs increase the number of angel investments and average investment size.
Like anyone trying to get something done with limited time and resources, economic developers have a lot of options to weigh when formulating a strategy to attract and retain businesses in their local economy. Over the years, economic development researchers have espoused a succession of theories as they’ve learned more about the many factors that influence economic growth. Historically, practitioners have tended to respond by focusing their efforts around what they perceive as the latest and greatest thinking, often at the expense of previously favored approaches. In practice, this has led to waves in which economic developers have focused on recruiting large, established companies or on fostering home-grown start-ups—but rarely both.
This paper examines price discovery and liquidity provision in the secondary market for bitcoin -- an asset that has no observable fundamentals and is associated with a high level of speculative trading. Based on a comprehensive dataset of the full limit order book of BTC-e over the 2013-2014 period, we find that order informativeness generally increases with order aggressiveness within the first 10 tiers, but that this pattern reverses in the outer layers of the book. In a high volatility environment, aggressive orders seem to be more attractive to informed agents, as reflected by the increased information content of such orders, although market liquidity appears to migrate outward in response to the information asymmetry.
This paper provides basic facts on worker flows between former Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) employees and large audit firms. Using a large sample of publicly available curricula vitae, we document that an increasing number of former PCAOB employees join U.S. audit firms in senior-level positions during recent years. We also find that the number of PCAOB employees hired by these firms is positively related to the number of deficiencies reported in their prior PCAOB inspection report, and that the number of deficiencies reported in firms’ future inspection reports is negatively associated with the number of former PCAOB employees hired.
In this paper, we build on research on the microfoundations of strategy and learning processes to study the individual underpinnings of organizational learning. We argue that once an individual has accumulated a certain amount of experience with a task, the benefit of accumulating additional experience is inferior to the benefit of deliberately articulating and codifying the experience accumulated in the past.
This paper characterizes the implications of risk-on/risk-off shocks for emerging market capital flows and returns. We document that these shocks have important implications not only for the median of emerging markets flows and returns but also for the left tail.
On Thursday, December 14, leaders in public finance, private equity, venture capital, hedge funds and investment management convened at the Kenan Center in Chapel Hill to discuss 2018 investment challenges and opportunities. The 2018 Investment Outlook forum was sponsored by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
This paper studies how corporate tax cuts in developed countries affect economies in the developing world. We focus on one of the most prominent fiscal policies – the corporate income tax regime – and study a major U.K. tax cut as an exogenous shock to foreign investment in Africa.